Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Sunday, September 27, 2015

The Refugee Tragedy and the next Global Conflict

David Milliband, writing in the Evening
Standard on the 4th September 2015 related how, in 1940, his father
and grand father fled Belgium
to Britain
and were “accepted” into the country as refugees. In 1945 his
grand father returned to Belgium
to find his wife and daughter, both of whom had spent the war years in hiding.
He applied with them to immigrate to Britain and was turned down because
the Home Secretary said he could not sanction “a flood”.David Millibands’ interpretation of this
event – defining the difference between an immigrant (seeking a better life)
and a refugee (fleeing persecution) missed the point entirely. Britain
then as now, was antisemitic.

The horrifying revelations around the Shoah
made no difference to the hardhearted and bigoted ruling classes, especially,
under the Labour Government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign
Minister Ernest Bevin.Britain’s
Foreign Office (Department of State) and its administrative classes were
relentlessly antisemitic and unfailingly pro-Arab.The Balfour Declaration
in 1917 was the twentieth century’s one exception that made the rule.

The historical reality is that Britain allowed
a paltry number of Jewish refugees into the United Kingdom before World War 2
and they all had to have homes to go to so that there would be no burden upon
the state.Britain’s
ruling classes made sure that those people who were accepted into Britain
were the “right kind of Jews” – they were middle class, intelligent and Western
educated and yet the hostility of officialdom remained steadfast.

His analysis of the migrant crisis today is
also flawed by his ideological myopia.So, he refuses to acknowledge either the political antecedents to the
current crisis and the historical failures that have left Western nations
unprepared for the latest crisis.Those
people trying to flee conflict and the economic migrants that seek a better life
have both had their funds plundered by people traffickers and criminal
gangs.But that is only part of the
problem that we refuse to acknowledge because to do so would involve, by
necessity, a change in international immigration policy and a muscular and
wholly unwelcome military response to ongoing international crises.

David Milliband’s selective analysis of the causes
behind regional instability – those causes that created the current refugee
crisis in Europe - is distressing because
without honest debate around those sources of conflict, instability can only
grow and create with it, ever escalating disruption and dislocation.Without addressing the causes of the current
crisis the probability of global conflict can only increase.

David Milliband refers to “decades-old wars in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo” as
well as in Afghanistan
and Syria-Iraq without offering explanation, background or any suggestions for
how to stop them.He refers to “the
wider phenomenon of regional instability, the proxy wars causing chaos in Yemen” without mentioning
who is the paymaster for that regional instability (it is the Islamic Republic
of Iran).He states that Syria’s
middle-classes are ‘fleeing,’ but he fails to join the dots to connect the collapse
of the middle-classes with the failure of the state and its consequent future inability
to be rebuilt as a stable entity.

When failed nations reassert their independence
(in whatever form they eventually take), stability is reliant on the
people being in place to lead.But the
core of their communities will probably remain in Europe,
enriching European society. This is in spite of the fact that a recent survey
disclosed a significant percentage of refugees and migrants, and their second
generation descendants are not only disengaged from their host society but also
financially dependent on those societies, to maintain their relatively comfortable
European lifestyle.

There are lessons to be learned from history.
When in 1947-48 the Arab leadership of what was then known as Palestine fled to
their gated mansions in Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, Amman and Cairo the Arab
peasantry that remained behind were left beleaguered, largely without
leadership and therefore, without guidance.They were vulnerable to the depredation, malice and greed of local and
foreign Muslim gangs who fled to ‘safety,’ once the lethality of the fighting
with the Jews of Palestine began to seriously impact the profitability of their
enterprise.Worse was the definition uniquely
appropriated to Arab refugees from that conflict; unique in all the history of
human conflict, it provided them with a status that could never be resolved. Despair, false hope and superpower
machinations even then undermined regional stability because it would not encourage
resettlement.

The Arab refugees from Palestine became victims
of their own leaders’ propaganda when the wealthier classes, the local Arab
leadership and those racially or religiously intolerant of any future that
involved living under Jewish control fled to the neighboring Muslim lands.

The Muslim world, unlike its Western rival, has
rarely, if ever, been forced to confront the racism within its society. Its
religious bigotry is instead, worn as a badge of honor. There is enormous resentment
feeding Muslim interaction with minorities through those dreamed of Muslim empires.This is the reason that Muslims are so welcoming
of vile and murderous organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic
State (Daesh), al-Qaeda and all of their affiliates.

It is not their fundamentalism that is bereft
of morality (although this could be argued is contributing to the outcome) but
the inevitable conclusion of extremist thinking that is encouraged by so many
of their ideological and functional leadership.That conclusion is perpetual warfare waged against everyone who cannot
prove that they too are “true believers” and of course in that two-word
honorific is the root of all suffering.

It is this inhumanity that is demonstrated
throughout the Muslim world, every day.In the United Kingdom
between April and June 2015 one thousand cases of Female Genital Mutilation
(FGM) were reportedly carried out. And it is
illegal in the UK so what
would have happened if Britain
made FGM legal?A video also recently
surfaced of a father in the Arab world proudly handing his daughter over to a
Sharia court for execution by stoning. Her crime was disobedience.

There is a refugee crisis in Europe but one of its
main causes, the one David Milliband refuses to be drawn into acknowledging, is the
moral blight that has penetrated every section of the Muslim world.

The refugee crisis cannot be solved while we continue
to rejoice in our multicultural diversity because all it means is that we are
too cowardly to take a stand against barbarism. And a selective stand against
injustice is no more than a cynically toadying acknowledgment of our
international impotence, a grotesquely judicious application of morality.

If Turkey is unwilling to exercise
control over its borders it should be expelled from NATO and allied forces
gathered to collect immigrants and refugees and relocate them to a neutral zone
in a failed state, to be administered by Europeans (and who-ever else is
willing to assist in the task).

It is the only realistic way to:

a)protect vulnerable people from
exploitation

b)to process large numbers of refugees

c)to return economic migrants to their
country of origin

If Syria cannot be saved it should be
re-divided, with appropriate border adjustments to foster stability.Kurdish self-determination should be granted
and separate self-governing cantons established for the Alawites, Shia, Sunni,
Christian and Druze minorities, all within the former Syria. At a
time in the future the cantonization of Syria will lead to a united nation,
perhaps based on the Swiss model.But
for now the toxic ethnic and religious conflicts crisscrossing the former Syria defile
any national aspirations that its competing war-lords may have harbored.

To rebuild Arab and the greater global Muslim society,
to contribute in a way that meaningfully addresses local concerns and provides
wise leadership at all levels of society requires people, many of whom have
fled to foreign lands, to return and rebuild the nation. If that leadership is comfortably domiciled in
Europe that rebuilding will be delayed by
decades if not longer. Current estimates place the end to the Syrian conflict
and a return to ‘normality’ at twenty years into the future.

The flight of the Arab masses from Syria, Iraq
and Lebanon are a positive
outcome for their regional rivals in Turkey,
Iran and even, in Egypt and not
just because it debases two Arab, formerly military heavyweights. Unless the
world’s superpowers and European nations are willing to radically change their geo-strategic
thinking on how to conduct a stabilization strategy within the Near–East that
conflict will spill over into Europe and not just Europe but the nations that
are on the periphery of the Near-East (Pakistan, [India], Asia and Russia).

It is this failure of imagination that could
create the instability that unintentionally leads to the next global conflict.

3 comments:

I have a Muslim friend, a uni lecturer and I ask him for his inside view of what's happening in Egypt, where he came from. Pretty well nothing he tells me is what I expect to hear and it all sounds pretty real. What it mostly seems to get down to is corruption in the guise of religion or social justice or you name it. Basically a power or money grab presented as a holy war. His Farouk v Nasser story is fascinating as is his version of what's really going on between The Moslem Brotherhood and the Egyptian military. I say to him why don't you teach in the local mosque schools, a smart guy like you? He asks me if I'm nuts and if I want to get him killed. And this is in Sydney. OK, it's only one example but I suspect that in the Islamic world the barbarians are in full control, the 'good Germans' among them are hiding because they'd like to keep breathing and the solution is invent an oil substitute, arm the local anti-Islamists to the teeth, the Christians and the Kurds, seal the borders and run.

You need to read an entire article before commenting. No one is addressing the failure to integrate or the underlying issues that have created the mass exodus from various countries. As I referred to in the above.